A veteran teacher turned coach shadows two students for two days

  > In addition, there was a good deal of sarcasm and snark
  > directed at students
  > ...
  > I realize that sarcasm, impatience, and annoyance are a
  > way of creating a barrier between me and them.

From a european point of view that is something the entire us-american culture embraces and grapples with vigorously, to the detriment of interactions among themselves and with other cultures. It would make sense that this is started and reinforced in school already.

The three points from the article:

> [1] Students sit all day, and sitting is exhausting.

> [2] High School students are sitting passively and listening during approximately 90% of their classes.

> [3] You feel a little bit like a nuisance all day long.

People wonder why high school aged students are unruly, unpleasant, and filled with deep negative emotions (anger, disdain, need-to-rebel). I look at this list (especially [2] and the lack of autonomy that follows) and the reason seems really clear. The basic model seems broken.

Was your college experience a lot like high school in that regard? I don't feel like mine was. My schedule never involved 6+ hours of sitting without breaks. Even in semesters with a heavy workload, some of the classes were always labs or very interactive, not just lectures. If classes were back-to-back, they were still often in different buildings, so there was a bit of an exercise break between lectures as opposed to walking down the hall in the same HS building. Virtually all professors were open to questions before/after class or had office hours or a TA with office hours -- asking questions was not seen as being a nuisance. Laptops/phones were allowed in nearly all lectures, which breaks up the monotony of sitting passively even during a lecture.

I'd like to step back from this from a moment and get a little more abstract and ask if this idea of shadowing applies to software products (or any other business, really).

Has anyone really sat down and shadowed one of their users for a whole day? I know small usability studies are pretty common. You get someone in a room, ask them to perform some tasks, see what they do. But if you have an app that people are going to spend their whole day in, e.g. email, office suite, productivity, does anyone really sit down and shadow a user for a day?

There might be things you don't notice if you only do it for an hour or two, or is it just not the same when the user isn't required by an authority to be present?

To address your points:

[1] My college schedule was considerably more broken up, including a 10 minute break in classes that were longer than 90 minutes. In fact, I almost never had a block of classes longer than 3 hours which didn't have at least an hour before more classes happened. During the time I wasn't in class, I was unsupervised and able to walk around a large campus, stop by the gym, go off campus, etc. All of these serve to considerably break up the day versus high school, where I had something like 4.5 hours of classes a day, in 90 minute blocks, with two 10 minute breaks and a 30 minute break which was my only chance to eat food all day.

[2] Even sitting in the classroom, I was allowed considerably more freedom in college. I was (generally) allowed to eat, use my laptop as I saw fit. Further, my college classes were generally more interactive, with strong group/class discussion components, exploring examples in class, etc. The whole process was much more dynamic than my high school classes were on average.

[3] It's certainly true that you shouldn't bother other people during the lecture (such as making loud noises), but my experience in college was again that it was actually easier to ask questions when I didn't understand, either within class or during office hours/tutoring times. Partly, this is just a maturity thing: you get more used to asking people for help as you get older and place more value on your understanding of the topic.

I think the dual role of teenager babysitter and education facility negatively impacts the school's role in education at times - such as when they keep students more controlled and have more instruction time than is likely necessary so that way teenagers aren't just free all the time to wander around town. Colleges (and the experiences of the students) benefit from only having to do one of the two things.